Minimum market prices

[Wolf Snare]

They are too high. As an Indy there were way too many people storing troops at minimum prices and it was basically inactive and impossible for an Indy to make any money through it. Mercenaries is currently the only viable way to solo Indy, which is not ideal.
Bring back an active market by lowering market minimums to slightly more than mercinary sell rates. There is too much competition to sell at the current rates.
This way we can still prevent market abuse via cheap price NW swaps, but give the game an active marketplace like it was intended.
Thoughts?

[Sevz]

I'm not sure what the base minimum prices are but I've always noticed players at redwall aren't the smartest.
Not sure why the market is always getting ignored and its sad to watch.

Wolf is great at making food and cash but the merc prices are horrible. It only makes sense to buy from the public market since wolf has a good defense bonus. Wolves are hard to break so if the market is filled with cheap troops I'll change race and make you rich.

Best way for a solo Indy is use Lizard instead of Rat and build forage structures instead of pure barracks. Rely on sacking the wolf players who have no defense.

The game needs a bit of tuning but everything I recommend they do the opposite so I don't waste my time these days.

[Shadow]

Thing is, we've tried with super low market minimums before, and it didn't make the market active - it just meant you needed less cash to get your stuff off the market when you were done storing. I've tried just about everything I could think of to increase public market activity and it just doesn't work with a small player base because people only want to buy from their allies.

It's a good thought, but it doesn't work simply because of the small player base.

[windhound]

Yep, promi as a game doesn't work that well with < 20 active players, best with 50+

I was going to set a static public market price this round but didn't get around to it.
That'd seem to deal with most of the public market issues (?):
Still no pulling marketed goods.  Everyone's stuff gets put on the market at the same price, so you can't choose who's stuff you're buying, and you can't lower the price temporarily so an ally can buy it.

I was thinking of setting the price at the base merc levels (ignoring race modifies).  Maybe 10% lower.

And Sevz, I've responded to most of your posts explaining what I thought and why I liked or disliked it.  It's never been personal, some of your ideas aren't workable with our code and playerbase, some are.
You're free to disagree, but I hope you at least understand where we're coming from.

[Shadow]

Fixed price/no pull is good. If we wanted to get fancy we could have the price dynamically change as things are bought and sold - decreasing as stuff gets put on the market and increasing as more is bought, to simulate supply and demand.

[Wolf Snare]

Those are great ideas. How hard would supply and demand pricing be to code into a static market? I trust you could work out an algorithm to put things on autopilot with ease.

[Shadow]

Shouldn't be too hard, but might take some tweaking to get the numbers right. I'll take a crack at something and aim for September round (or whenever the next one is, I've lost track).

How would you guys feel about a small percentage of public market goods being autosold periodically at current market prices? It would help stop storage from working, and give indies an incentive to sell to the public market since they are guaranteed at least some sales at much higher than merc sell prices by next run.

As for price ranges, I had in mind the following:

rats: 350-650
weasels: 750-1375
stoats: 1500-2750
skiffs: 2250-4125
food: 9-18

This is equivalent to the range of merc buy prices between a ferret with max camps at the low end and a rat with no camps at the high end, so it represents the full range of possible merc buy prices over every combination of race/building setup in the game. Food prices are set by the exchange rates determined by the best and worst leader-feasting race balanced against the best and worst leader-cashing race (I still need to double check those numbers in the code). Over time, with the formula I have in mind, you can expect the prices to slowly converge toward the midpoints, and would go high if there was very little available on the market, and go low if the market was flooded:

rats: 500
weasels: 1062
stoats: 2125
skiffs: 3187
food: 13.5

Should probably raise merc food price to 15 while we're at it.

Reasonable? We could go even lower, all the way down to merc sell prices, if that would be of interest.

[Shadow]

This is mostly coded (except for the autosell, I'll leave that out for now and see how this does by itself). Should be good to go for next round.

[austfit]

HEy, thank you!!!